The Tribe is finally feeling the fans' love

World Series run, Encarnación signing put Indians on
pace to reach biz targets

Brian Barren, who had spent the previous 24 years at Procter & Gamble, said he asked "a million questions" after he was hired by the Cleveland Indians in January 2014.

During his initial foray into the sports industry, Barren, then the Indians' executive vice president of sales and marketing, did a 100-day assessment of the franchise. Despite the Tribe making an American League Wild Card appearance the previous fall, Barren's review wasn't the most optimistic report he had ever put together.

The former Princeton University football teammate of then-Tribe president Mark Shapiro looked at three key business metrics — paid attendance, revenue and revenue per capita (the club's revenue divided by its paid attendance).

During the 1990s, Barren said the Tribe "was in the top third of the third in Major League Baseball." By 2014, though, the Indians had plummeted to "the bottom third of the bottom third," which would put them among the three or four worst-performing clubs.

In his third-floor office at Progressive Field, Barren — who was promoted to president of business operations in February — has the objectives that spun from that organizational study spread out on a wall. It's what he calls his "15 and 5" battle cry, with the Tribe's performance in each metric highlighted in red, yellow and green — making what could be a complicated read as easy as looking at a traffic light.

The 15 is a ranking — the Indians hope to be in the middle of the pack among the 30 MLB teams in the three revenue segments. The five represents the number of years they have to achieve their objectives.

By the end of that stretch, which runs from 2015 to '19, the Indians also want to lead the six other clubs they believe are in their peer group — the Baltimore Orioles, Cincinnati Reds, Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers, Pittsburgh Pirates and Tampa Bay Rays — in what Barren calls the "revenue-generating product segments." Those consist of four ticket sales metrics (premium, group, season and single game), plus corporate partnerships.

"If we led our peer group, we'd be better than 15th (overall), but it's the whole idea of put something out there that's achievable," said Barren, who was in charge of Procter & Gamble's $9 billion Kroger Business prior to joining the Tribe.

Those goals, as lofty, or even unrealistic, as they might have seemed at the time, got a 1990s-style jolt from the 2016 Indians.

It turned out that a fun, likable team making a World Series run could produce the type of gate numbers and sales surges — albeit belatedly — the club had been seeking.

The Encarnacion factor

The Indians entered the final few days of spring training with 12,400 full-season equivalents, which marked a 55% year-over-year increase and was the club's largest season-ticket total in nine years.

In addition, as of March 29, season-ticket accounts were up 140% year-over-year (to 8,000), and group sales had increased 45%. The Tribe had sold 1.3 million tickets — a number they didn't reach until July 22 last year.

That progress, Barren said, has put the club on pace to get to 15th in the key revenue categories by 2019.

The head of the Tribe's business team admits the 2016 surge was "largely driven" by single-game sales during the Indians' playoff run. It could be argued, though, that the club is in position to continue to contend for the next few seasons, which would keep the biz side on track to go from the cellar to hitting above its weight class. A bulked-up season-ticket base also gives the organization more of a cushion during the spring months, when weeknight home games often draw crowds of fewer than 10,000.

The Indians' first extended postseason run in nine years started the sales boom, but it was the largest free-agent signing in club history — a three-year, $60 million deal for slugger Edwin Encarnacion — that took it to another level. The Tribe added 150 full-season equivalents and 250 new season-ticket accounts in the first four days after news broke in December that the club and Encarnacion had agreed to a deal.

"The best Christmas present we could ever get was finding out about Encarnacion," said Tim Salcer, the Tribe's vice president of sales and service.

In the months since, the Indians have added more than 2,000 FSEs.

"That obviously has led to a substantive change in our business," said Barren, who termed the Encarnacion contract "a leap of faith from ownership."

Photo

Brian Barren

BY THE NUMBERS

12,400: Full-season-ticket
equivalents the Indians have sold. That's a 55%
year-over- year increase. 8,000:
Season-ticket accounts — a 140% YOY jump. 1.3
million: Tickets the Indians have sold — a 65% YOY
increase. July 22: The date at which the
Tribe reached the 1.3 million mark in 2016.
45%: Year-over-year increase in group
ticket sales.

Office scorecards

The on-field product "needs to be competitive" for the Indians to have a chance to thrive on the business side, Barren said.

As luck would have it, two key dates for Barren's biz team coincided with memorable moments from the baseball club.

The Indians sold more than 200,000 tickets during their franchise-record 14-game winning streak. That 15-day stretch, from mid-June to July 1, occurred shortly before the Tribe started its season-ticket renewals.

Photo

KEN BLAZE

On Aug. 19, when the Indians launched their Playoff Payoff, outfielder Tyler Naquin hit an inside-the-park home run.

And when the club launched its Playoff Payoff, which ensures postseason access for fans who place a season-ticket deposit, outfielder Tyler Naquin capped a 3-2 win over the Toronto Blue Jays on Aug. 19 with an inside-the-park, walkoff home run.

"Talk about a perfect storm," Barren said.

Now, entering a season in which the oddsmakers believe the Indians are one of the top two teams in the American League, the Tribe's revenue-counters aren't going to assume everything is great.

Working at a consumer goods giant such as P&G, figuring out where you stand isn't much different than looking at the MLB standings on your phone.

"You walk out of your office and you see a stock ticker every day," Barren said. "You have to report your earnings every 90 days. You can't say, 'I pulled my hamstring. I'm not going to make it for earnings.' You need to stand and be accountable for that, and it's very public."

The Tribe's revenue numbers are anything but, which is the norm in Barren's new industry. But there are still plenty of ways for the business team to gauge how it's performing.

Barren believes three tenets — business (starting with "clear plans"), process (how you execute such plans) and people (whom you hire and how you develop them) — will determine how the Tribe fares.

"Because there's no salary cap in baseball, it's incumbent upon the business team to create as much flexibility for baseball operations as possible," Barren said.

Of the 10 teams that advanced to the 2016 postseason, the Indians were the only club that was below the major-league average in revenue and payroll.

That's why something as basic as being average — a No. 15 revenue ranking — is so enticing.

"We like our chances if we can put ourselves competitively from a business standpoint in the middle of the pack," Barren said.

Getting there will require the Indians to "be pushing north of 15,000" full-season-ticket equivalents, a milestone the organization last reached in 2008. The Indians have long said that group is the most important aspect of their business, and the response to a season that came this close to the organization's first championship since 1948 has been as encouraging as any of the green marks on Barren's office scorecard.